Monday, October 01, 2007

More found futures

Inhale™ Health Enhancing Cigarettes

Garden of Eden™ Neurofoods ®

MemoGum™ Chewable memory sticks

Transgendrin™

FoundFutures codirector Jake Dunagan and I recently took a few snaps of some of the futures artifacts designed for us last year by Hawaii-based graphic artists Sky Kiyabu and Steve Kiyabu (who claim to be unrelated).

These hypothetical products are not photoshop confections, but rather tangible items that are intended to be encountered physically, on an unexpected and serendipitous basis, out in the world. So that's where we like to put them. But real space has its limitations, and while we wait impatiently for Internet and other technologies to enable sensory experience in four dimensions, these 2D shots will have to suffice.

Artifacts from the future are very much on our minds again as gear up for the next project in the series of FoundFutures interventions. We're very excited but can't say too much more at this point, except watch this space for more. And Chinatown, Honolulu, if you're in the vicinity.
[Also posted at the HRCFS weblog.]

3 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Hey Stuart, I’ve been trawling through your web-site lately, and I just thought I would say that it is all very engaging to say the least! I’ve loved looking back through your last few blogs and have been trying to think of some of the global implications of what you are talking about. Anyway, just thought I’d say how stimulating some of your posts have been, and I will, indeed, continue to watch your space for more developments!

Hey Stuart, you are more than welcome! You’re posts are very interesting and have certainly made me think about things in a different way (unfortunately, I am not even the least bit artistic!) My area of interest is International Relations, or more specifically, notions of global democracy. As traditional notions of power are increasing spilling over the boundaries of the nation-state, it seems more and more important to keep these global forces accountable and democratic (at least in some sense, anyway). Hence, I have been thinking about global forms of democracy and global society. However, one of the main ‘sticking-points’ in this type of argument is that it requires ‘active’ global citizens to participate at a global level in order to make it functional. This requires getting large numbers of people to think about possible futures and implications in order to make good, rational decisions. That’s probably one of the reasons that I loved the ‘guerrilla futures’ approach you have been talking about. Anything that gets large numbers of people (outside the confines of academia in particular) to think critically about real and pressing futures issues is, in my opinion, a big step towards the type of ‘active citizenship’ that the globe needs right now! Cheers mate